Rescuing the Beauty, Book

About the book

If we never understand and deal with what got the Hero and the Beauty in the mess in the first place, there is nothing to stop the cycle of falling from the heroic triumph of love back into the depths of despair and longing, where the villain rules and the glory of love is lost.

We keep the story alive by telling it again and again, stopping just when we know there is more danger ahead. We want to stop while we feel good. Let them ride off into the sunset. We don't want to know what happens when Robin Hood and Maid Marian get married, have children, set up house, stop stealing, get a regular job, and grow old. The hope is there, the haunting, the calling to something greater, but fear keeps us from wanting to find out what happens after the initial rescue.

To deal with that fear, we must go back and start the whole story from the beginning. In the recesses of the past, we find that while a rescue always begins in a key conflict, it is not a single event like the partial story leads us to believe. Story tellers love the idea of a daring rescue - a single moment of intense conflict and it's over! But story tellers always compress time. In our living story, captivity and freedom are not static. They grow over time. If we knew what came before, we'd understand not only what makes a Hero and a Beauty and how a rescue can happen, but what keeps them in that glory. And that is what our heart longs for. We don't want it to end. We want to believe not only that the rescue can really happen, but that the glory of love can be sustained. So let's go back.

In the beginning...